OJS

just happen to be the initials I share with OJ Simpson. This is a fact I’ve been aware of since I was young, and OJ was a football star and popping up in the occasional star-studded seventies disaster film. I liked the coincidence, and sometimes referred to myself as OJ Steinhauer.

I got over this by the time I hit high school, and largely forgot about the man. Then the murders happened, and no one would let any of us forget about the ex-sportsman and b-movie actor. Because I felt I had to have an opinion on his guilt or innocence, I spent weeks going either way. Then I decided I just didn’t know. I suspected he was guilty, but stranger things than OJ’s innocence have happened in this world.

But then, I decided I didn’t give a damn. Not really. A man kills his ex-wife and her lover. It happens every day, all over the world. It’s a despicable and primitive act, no matter who does it. And no matter how much people wanted to spin it, the resulting trial was less about race relations in America than it was about class and money and what can be bought in America.

And then lots of other things happened in the world and in my own life, and I again forgot all about him. But now we’re all being reminded again with his If I Did It, a completely unnecessary book charting out how Simpson would have committed the murders, had he committed them. A piece of perverse hypothetical musing about how to kill your wife.

Why? I don’t know what Simpson’s reasoning is (the proceeds from the book are supposed to go to his children, not him), but his publisher, Judith Regan, has her own reasoning. She believes he’s completely and obviously guilty, and that this book is a confession. “I would have had no interest in publishing anything but that.”

The families of the deceased are pissed. It’s an insult to the memories, etc, but one major gripe must be that, since the book’s royalties are supposedly heading to the kids rather than to Simpson, they’ll never see the $33.5 million owed to them from their civil suit.

Mr. Simpson lives in Florida, where homestead laws protect a person’s house against seizure for the payment of court judgments. His pension from the National Football League, which has been estimated at $400,000 a year, also cannot be seized. With no other obvious income, there has been little for the victims’ families to recover.

wrote that she believed it was her responsibility as a publisher to bring Mr. Simpson’s words to the public, and she likened her role to “the mainstream publishers who keep Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” in print to this day.”